Pre-Production « Moving Pictures

So Begins Another…

03.20.07

Today marks the beginning of yet another project from Moving Pictures.

Nathan has come up with a great idea for another project which ironically was inspired by a gathering of the “3x” cast and crew around the dinner table, combined with elements from the film “Hard Candy“.

So what better way to introduce a new project then with a quote from a wise Greek man.

“Whence things have their origin, thence also their destruction happens, according to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense for their injustice in conformity with the ordinance of Time.”
–Anaximander

Here is just a taste of what is to come…

The Dinner Party

“A dysfunctional family falls apart.

The abusive Father leaves,
The pissed off older son leaves to become a priest,
The pissed off younger son is left behind to take care of his dying mother.

In order to pay the bills and keep food in his mother’s mouth, the younger brother becomes a hired gun…

Now, years later, the younger brother, Caspian, invades the house of the older brother, Gibson…

…in order to make him his last meal.”

That’s all for now folks, stay tuned to the Moving Pictures production blog for further information.

Catch Ya Later
-Mitch

Posted by Mitch Buehler

Filed in Behind the Scenes, Pre-Production, The Dinner Party

Rotoscope Hell.

03.18.07

Today has been a somewhat productive day. This weekend I haven’t been much in the mood to edit as I was more interested in just relaxing and enjoying the “break”, after all I think we all deserve a bit of a break.

However never one to just sit back and accomplish nothing I decided that today was going to be the day that I start testing out the ability to make changes to our film using Photoshop and After Effects.

It didn’t go so well at first. Took me a while to get things working, to figure out what frame size I was supposed to use in photoshop and the like (turns out it doesn’t matter if the footage is in widescreen or not – Final Cut can make that compensation, but if you make the compensation in Photoshop then Final Cut doesn’t know what to do… yeah. Like that makes sense).

Anyways, since it took me a while to figure out how to get it to actually work I decided to try and do something a little simpler… at least something I thought was going to be somewhat simpler.

The task: to isolate the footage of a plastic bag which revealed the killer.

Basically I had to take the shot, and digitally paint out everything but the bag (the sky, and the killer). The first few tests were… unsuccessful. The next few went better but they looked pretty shitty. So by the third try and used a couple different techniques and managed to get it down pretty well. Thank god the shot was so short that it only ended up being about 10 frames that had to be edited (yes, that’s less than a second of footage and it took me an hour… not looking forward to some of those longer shots).

Then I had to re-import all the frames back into Final Cut (and pray that I did everything properly… I did) and then cut them all down to be one frame long and create our image.

The result is actually quite catching. Because the bag is created by each individual frame rather than using interlaced video the bag has a very crisp and eerie quality to it (if you compare it to the original video it looks considerably different… but in a much better way).

I am very proud of the result.

However I got to say, rotoscoping is a hideous bitch goddess… kudos to those visual effects artists you make their living doing this… I know I sure as hell couldn’t put up with it.

[current music: Head Turner from the album "Introducing Joss Stone" by Joss Stone]
(I highly recommend you pick this album up when it is released later this week. It is fantastic, very funky and jazzy. Great to roto to!)

Posted by adamschoales